Elastic Beanstalk: Simplify the Cloud

The only problem with AWS is that it is really versatile. It is packed with an ever-increasing number of services. Each of these services continues to evolve, taking on more functionality and flexibility. It is natural that some of us find this overwhelming.

I am not interested in the details and its crazy configurations. I don’t care for the Dockers, Kubernetes, Serverless, VPC, subnets, availability zones, Security Group, EC2 Instances and all that nonsense. I have a business problem and I have a working code. I just want to deploy this in the cloud and focus my business rather than messing around.

Is that your state of mind? Don’t worry, you are not alone. AWS cares for you, and they have made Elastic Beanstalk just for you. This is one of the many services in AWS, that focus on providing a simplified interface to the core services.

With Elastic Beanstalk, we can easily deploy and manage applications in AWS, without bothering about the details of the underlying infrastructure and its configuration and other complexities. We just upload the application code and then it takes care of the details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, scaling, application health monitoring, and all that is required!

The basics

So you have a working NodeJS application. It works in the local environment, now you want to deploy it on the cloud and let the world benefit from your innovation. Certainly don’t want to waste your energy and passion on choosing the EC2 instances and the VPC or security group configurations. You don’t care for the IAM. You just want to deploy the application and start selling subscriptions.

Certainly, we can do that. Let’s check how. We create the AWS account and start working on it.

Jump over to the Elastic Beanstalk console and follow the steps:

Provide Application Name: HelloServer. In Platform, choose NodeJS, and pick the latest versions from the dropdown. Then, select “Upload your code” and choose the local file.